Politicians and pornography

In politics, appearing to do something is often more important than actually doing anything. This is especially so when tackling global phenomena over which individual governments have little or no control.

In an appropriate spirit of impotent rage, Prime Minister David Cameron announced today that the British government was going to do something about online pornography:

Most households in the UK will have pornography blocked by their internet provider unless they choose to receive it, David Cameron has announced.

Two other reports suggest that this policy is not all it’s cracked up to be. The first is the row between the government and the ISPs that preceded this announcement, which demonstrates that the government has simply not thought through the practicalities of its policy. The second is that the Daily Mail is claiming all the credit for this “crackdown on web filth” (despite the Mail’s hypocrisy, demonstrated by the links to various salacious stories down the right-hand column of its report).

But even if this policy were better conceived, it would still be doomed. Several years ago, Scott Adams (creator of the Dilbert strip cartoon) invited us to ponder the futility of such measures by asking us to imagine which was the more powerful force in the world: the combined brains of all the world’s greatest computer experts, or the combined libidos of all the world’s teenage boys.

A bizarre obsession with photography

BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs today featured actor and comedian Hugh Laurie.

His selection of music was intelligent and heavily biased to the blues. However, the reason for drawing this programme to your attention is an interesting observation he made:

I heard the other day that there have been more photographs taken in the last twelve months than there have ever been taken, in the world, ever. Because people are now photographing – I shudder to think what they are photographing – everything and nothing. No interaction is deemed to have actually happened unless somebody has a picture of it. Nobody is satisfied with having met a person without having a photograph to prove it. I think that is odd, and I think it’s so odd that it might actually be starting to alter the way we think about each other and the way we think about general day-to-day social interaction.

What prompted this observation was the fact that digital photography has meant there is no longer any escape for a celebrity in a public space. But even when there are no celebrities around, it is notable how people with digital cameras and camera phones seem to be taking pictures constantly, so that they are no longer experiencing life directly but at one remove.

The problem is not photography or even digital photography per se but its incessant and indiscriminate use. As Laurie says, photography has become a curious form of validation of experience. It also makes you wonder what people do with all the photos they take. Digital photography means that people rapidly accumulate vast collections and, since they probably never look at most of these pictures more than a few days after taking them, it would seem that the act of capturing images is more important than the images themselves.

It has reached the point where some restaurant customers consider it quite normal to photograph each dish put in front of them, so that the image rather than the taste assumes greater importance.

It is a strange world where people think of ‘memory’ as something stored on a memory card rather than stored in their brains, and where life becomes something to capture rather than experience directly.

Wisdom of the crowd or online lynch mobs?

It was not my original intention to publish a trilogy of posts (see the first and second) expressing scepticism about digital technology – not so much the technology as the associated shallow culture. But this, the third, was prompted by a remarkable interview with Jaron Lanier, one-time digital pioneer and visionary.

Lanier was one of the leading gurus of ‘Web 2.0’ futurism. Now, he sees the monster he helped create as a mortal threat to political discourse, economic stability, human dignity, and society in general.

The article is worth reading in full, but Lanier’s views on the effects of web culture on politics are particularly noteworthy. He is especially critical of the idea that ‘the wisdom of the crowd’ will result in ever-upward enlightenment. It is just as likely that the crowd will degenerate into an online lynch mob:

As far back as the turn of the century, he singled out one standout aspect of the new web culture – the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websites – as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself. At the time, this objection seemed a bit extreme. But he saw anonymity as a poison seed. The way it didn’t hide, but, in fact, brandished the ugliness of human nature beneath the anonymous screen-name masks. An enabling and foreshadowing of mob rule, not a growth of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism.

It’s taken a while for this prophecy to come true, a while for this mode of communication to replace and degrade political conversation, to drive out any ambiguity. Or departure from the binary. But it slowly is turning us into a nation of hate-filled trolls.

Most people have a capacity for cruelty but online anonymity enables them to unleash that cruelty with impunity. Worse, the web enables like-minded cruel people to cohere rapidly, via twitchy social networks, into a cruel mob.

On this blog, we have a relatively simple comments policy (see right-hand column). The kernel of that policy is to insist on everyone using their real, full name because it forces them to think twice before commenting. We refuse to accept anonymous or pseudonymous comments, not because all anonymous commenters are arseholes but because all arsehole commenters are anonymous.

The merchants of cyber-bollocks

Are you tired of self-appointed cyber-gurus? The digital quacks who claim to have seen the future and insist everyone must fit into their dystopian dream?

Steven Poole exposes these charlatans in a scathing piece in the New Statesman:

As did many religious rebels before them, they come to bring not peace, but a sword. Change is inevitable; we must abandon the old ways. The cybertheorists, however, are a peculiarly corporatist species of the Leninist class: they agitate for constant revolution but the main beneficiaries will be the giant technology companies before whose virtual image they prostrate themselves.

Cybertheorists’ jargon often betrays an adolescent hatred of the world in which they find themselves. Jay Rosen, a prominent ‘future of news’ cyber-guru, takes care at every opportunity to sneer at publishing institutions by pasting to them the epithet ‘legacy’: ‘legacy newsrooms’, ‘legacy media’. Another favourite cyber-adjective is ‘disruptive’. For most of us, disruption is annoying, but for cyber-swamis the more disruptive of established practices technology becomes, the more exciting it is.

One target of Poole’s ire is cyber-thinkers who abuse the notion of the ‘wisdom of crowds’:

Cyber-thinkers have run with the wisdom-of-crowds notion to a place that bears little resemblance to reality as we know it, high-fiving each other among the rubble of reason in a fatuous kind of hi-tech, misanthropic herd-worship. It can now seriously be proposed that there are occasions when “the smartest person in the room is the room”, as the subtitle of the cybertheorist David Weinberger’s book Too Big to Know, published last January, claims. Its weirdly self-undermining idea (perfect for a Ted talk) is that books are outdated and useless ways of organising ‘information’ and that the sum total of information is now so overwhelming that we may as well throw up our hands and concede that ‘the network’ knows better than we do.

If Weinberger’s thesis were correct, then his book would be disposable, because a random cohort of bloggers could be expected to come up with something far superior in a couple of weeks. Weinberger’s book is also cyber-typical for its pseudo-democratic hatred of any kind of expertise, and its cartoonish intellectual history, in the service of pretending that our age is utterly novel. “The internet,” he opines grandly, “enables groups to develop ideas further than any individual could.” So have writing and talking, since time immemorial.

The intellectual weakness of cyber-thinkers is encapsulated in a single sentence:

Cybertheorists... daren’t attempt to distinguish information from knowledge, because to do so would require them to perform the kind of intellectual triage that their rhetorical success depends crucially on avoiding.

Exposing the cybertheorists as clothing-deficient emperors was long overdue. As Poole explains:

Cybertheorists love to apply the adjective ‘smart’ to one another but, as a group, they are the most prominent anti-intellectual cadre of our day – little Pol Pots of the touchscreen and Twitter.

Why 33⅓ rpm beats 160GB

If you found some sort of digital gadget among your Christmas presents yesterday, how did you feel? Overcome by excitement, or weary at the thought of having to plough through yet another instruction manual?

In today’s Guardian, John Harris argues that a revival in the sales of vinyl albums is a metaphor for a growing anti-digital rebellion, part of broader yearning for authenticity and human scale.

The evidence can be found not only in record-buying but also the Slow Food movement and a growth in the sales of craft beers at the expense of cheap lager. Books and magazines (the printed sort) were supposed to die out, yet sales are booming and reading groups thriving. Digital TV gives every viewer (even those with the minimum choice offered by Freeview) access to hundreds of channels, yet the five formerly analogue TV channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel 5) combined still attract over 50% of audience share. Plans to shut down analogue radio may be abandoned because of people’s stubborn attachment to analogue.

People are not rejecting digital technology (or any other technological change) per se but are responding to more fundamental issues:

• superficiality, in which depth of thought and learning is replaced by a cacophony of stimuli and distractions;
• impatience that never allows time for focus or contemplation, and which expresses a childlike inability to understand the concepts of deferred pleasure or acquired tastes;
• instant redundancy, so that this year’s ‘must-have’ gadget will be hopelessly outmoded next year.

The objection therefore is not to change or progress but to shallowness and a frantic pace.

The Liberal Democrats’ most creative thinker David Boyle wrote about this trend eight years ago in his book Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life. He points out that this is not a conservative trend, still less a Luddite rejection of all new technology. It is about feelings of alienation, a reaction against technological determinism and a belief that technology should be human scale and serve human needs.

If you agree, there is something you can do. Now that you’ve read this, switch off your computer and go and read a proper book.

Why robots are bad for your health

Here’s an interesting theory for what is going wrong with the economy, summarised in this FT Alphaville blog article [(free) registration required] by Izabella Kaminska. The article is well worth reading and includes lots of useful links.

The theory goes something like this. Originally, it was predicted that, as robots and computers took over more of the hard jobs, we would move to a more leisure-oriented society. Then economists forgot about that idea. And now they have remembered it again – but not in a good way.

Technological advance is causing abundance which depresses prices and threatens the return on capital. So the incumbent interests threatened by this trend have an increasing incentive to impose artificial scarcity. They are rationing new ideas by exploiting and extending the system of patents. As market power becomes more concentrated, incumbents are better able to stifle innovation and raise rents on the ideas they own. This ‘idea monopolisation’ has become a hugely counter-productive force in the economy. And this trend is manifest in the growth of companies that don’t produce anything but exist solely on the revenue of their patents.

So, robot and technology power is reducing the natural employment rate. But rather than our subsidising those who have lost jobs to technology, so as to spread that manna wealth that’s literally dropped onto the surface of the earth at no-one’s physical disadvantage, companies are using monopoly power to extort rents on the capital that is creating all that free wealth.

That’s why inequality is rising.

As technology proceeds in a patent-obsessed world, the fruits of innovation flow to the owners of the capital and invention, forming a whole new rentier class. The financial assets/debts that back the innovation technology, meanwhile, get disproportionally valuable as their purchasing power gets completely out of whack with the output they radically accelerate.

In other words, a rentier class of patent owners is hoarding ideas and extorting extravagant rents. Consequently wealth is concentrating instead of spreading outwards. Which is why those people who have been moved involuntarily into a ‘leisure-oriented society’ are finding they do not have the income to go with it. Perhaps that is why, as George Osborne alleges, they keep the curtains closed.

End of an era

The UK’s last typewriter has been manufactured today.

The question isn’t why. The question is how it survived this long.